Contact

About Me

My name is Sebastian Wolfram and I am designing Dungeon Colony. I have been working on this game for a few years (2011) and have found an intense passion in the process of building the game, the engine and everything around it. I am a one-man team and have hired some artists to do some graphic and sound work for the game.

I’m still working on the game almost every day. When my journey began I had not much experience working in games and my only ‘game project’ was something like Striker 1945 which I never finished. So everything I created for Dungeon Colony I tried to do it from scratch to teach myself all the concepts.

My engine is mostly built from ground up and uses only a few libraries where things get a bit too technical for me. One such underlying third party engine I use is called LWJGL or Light Weight Java Game Library. What I love about this engine is that it is extremely bare bone. There are some helpers to create a window & loop, handle input and it gives you access to some great open source tools such as OpenGL and OpenAL. But in the end the engine leaves the rest up to you. The documentation is quite good, and that’s maybe because there isn’t much to the engine. To me, that is a great canvas to really get your hands dirty. And if you didn’t know, Minecraft was first built using this engine and I think the Desktop version still has it under the hood.

Using the LWJGL engine to learn how to make games can really teach you a lot of things but the way I am working may not be for some groups of game developers. There are great libraries and engines on the web that provide you with everything you need to make great games fast. Unfortunately, they take away a part of the learning and the game building experience. For me, coding is like building LEGOs and a big part of the fun is building things from scratch. Maybe some day I will want to create a game with a a more fleshed out engine, especially if I want amazing 3D capabilities. But today, I love creating and controlling nearly every aspect of my engine and seeing how every piece works together.

I have created a business around Dungeon Colony in order to be able to collect money to pay for development costs. Selling the game is for the purpose of paying my artists, the servers, domains, and other monthly costs, overly high business costs, the occasional hardware and my super nice lawyer (no really!). Your support is vastly appreciated as it help keep this operation alive.

This is my first public indie game project and I can't wait to see how it evolves. If you have any comments or feedback contact me at the available contact options below.

I have a few toes in the game industry, mainly going to IGDA events or game conferences and the like.
Before programming games, I have worked mostly on business applications (still do), but also on some
AI such as Reinforcement Learning or Pattern Recognition algorithms, and things like web crawlers or tiny robots.
My true passion in computing is creating Simulations and building sandboxes that are highly responsive to user input.
To give you an idea for the inspiration behind Dungeon Colony, here is a list of my favorite classic games (not in order):
Dungeon Keeper which is by far the biggest inspiration for the game,
Monkey Island which has the best steel drum sound track ever,
and also Populous,
Doom,
Syndicate, and
Command & Conquer
There is also a board game called Hero Quest that has seen some epic battles. Newer games I like are
Minecraft, which was also a huge inspiration and I'm always returning to the Civ series.
Nowadays, I try out tons of indie games, and play Skyrim and Portal 2.
A while back, a couple of friends and I entered the Ludum Dare competition and made a game called Booster in the 72 hour jam.